The Quinn W. Shagbark Story

current day (recent update)

As of mid 2006, Quinn W. Shagbark is a 4-piece rock band that used to star Andrew Cullen, Ian Jacobson, Jon Treneff, Shawn Oram, and Chad Benson. 

the early years

Quinn W. Shagbark first began making musical appearances with his brother Floydd in Detroit, MI, sometime during the early 1990s. Side-stepping a crashing wave of mainstream alternative rock, the duo worked up a largely improvised mess of punk, folk, and psychedelia which they frequently turned loose on unsuspecting audiences in parking lots, parties, and community centers. Loping, ramshackle, and occasionally unsafe, the duo thrashed away on acoustic guitars and made up songs on the spot, often incorporating random thoughts and phrases tossed out by their audiences. Needless to say, these early performances were met with mixed reviews, though never criticized for lacking in excitement or energy.

After several years of this aimless clatter, Quinn relocated to southern Ohio and Floydd soon followed. It was here that the brothers met Frank Swank, who recruited them into a loose, early version of his band, "Swank." Frank shared the Shagbarks' obsession with reckless spontaneity, but also possessed a musical acumen far more advanced than that of his new friends from Michigan. He encouraged Quinn and Floydd to learn how to play their instruments, while Floydd impressed him with his songwriting and recording skills.

Floydd had recorded and released several cassettes of his own songs before leaving Michigan, but it was during his stay in Ohio that he truly came into his own as a songwriter and recording engineer. "thefloyddshagbark" was recorded in a tiny room he and Quinn shared during the fall of 1994. Not long after it's release, Floydd moved back to Michigan where he continued to record on his own while Quinn remained, occasionally participating in random jams and recording sessions with Swank.

The period of Quinn's life between 1994 and 1998 is a difficult one to reconstruct. Separated from his brother for the first time, and unsure of his ability to stake out territory as a solo artist, his musical output was minimal. While he hung around Frank Swank quite a bit and occasionally made appearances with Swank at parties, he was silent for the most part during these years.

He did, however, begin to adopt an unpredictable and seemingly random pattern of travel and correspondence. In between stays on couches and floorspaces in Ohio, he spent time wandering through Europe, working odd jobs in various parts of the Western and Northwestern states, and occasionally visiting his brother in Detroit. He also wrote intermittently for a variety of local newspapers in southwest Ohio.

The amount of time he spent in the Midwest gradually diminished, and in 1998, with Frank Swank concentrating on turning Swank into a more streamlined and organized project and Floydd Shagbark producing a string of exciting releases from his home in Michigan, Quinn announced to several friends that he was permanently relocating to the West Coast to look for work and write a novel.

Quinn Sings his Favourite Motown Hits

The novel was never written, but in the later months of 1998 Quinn recorded two cassettes, "Music for Children in Helicopters" and "Tofutonica Regrade," which were originally intended as demos for a collaboration with Frank Swank but ended up circulating through a handful of acquantances and friends in the Midwest. The music was hastily recorded on a boombox in Quinn's tiny Seattle apartment, but the songs were undeniably crafty and promising. The initial din soon died down, though, and for the summer and fall of '98 Shagbark lapsed back into silence.

The winter of 1998 was not a good time to be in the Pacific Northwest. At one point, it is widely reported that the city of Seattle experienced 91 consecutive days of rain. Little is known about Quinn's life during this period, but when friends around the country began receiving copies of his first proper full-length album, "Quinn W. Shagbark sings his Favourite Motown Hits," the gray sogginess practically dripped off the cassette. Originally intended as a tribute to the music of a hometown several thousand miles away, "Motown Hits" actually consists of entirely original material save for the two cover songs which bookend the album.

Regardless of the mood and tone of the release, it was clear that Quinn had finally come into his own. Once too shy to sing but possessing a balls-to-the wall enthusiasm (which often exceeded the reach of his technical skills) Quinn's debut finds him layering intelligent vocals and performing ably on guitar, banjo, harmonica, and a variety of household percussion. Drenched in feelings of confusion, regret, and obsession, the rubble of "Motown Hits" all the same contains a few scraps of hope which would prove to be an enduring aspect of Shagbark's sensibility. 

Halfast

Just six months after the appearance of "Motown Hits," Quinn followed up in the summer of 1999 with "Halfast," a more musical and upbeat affair packaged simply in brown paper. Production-wise, "Halfast" marked a great leap forward for Shabark and features a variety of bizarre sounds and tape effects. Whereas "Motown Hits" concerned itself mostly with rainy delusions, "Halfast" expressed a burgeoning restlessness and showcased many of the looser and carefree elements that characterized Quinn's teenaged performances with his brother. The sense of confinement running through songs such as "the golden handcuffs" and "the llama" would prove to be somewhat prescient, however, and soon after the release of "Halfast" Quinn would leave Seattle just as suddenly as he'd arrived to begin the most harrowing and hairbrained period of his career.

All Fixed Up

The hastily-recorded final song on "Halfast," "the fifth of july, 1999," opens with the line "I had no business being in public last night/with all those stairways and cement." It is a telling coda, as the summer of 1999 would prove to be a rough one for Shagbark. In between getting thrown out of movie theaters and losing vicious arguments with local street people, Shagbark attempted to turn an enormous, nine-foot-tall paper-mache volcano he constructed for a friend's Cinco de Mayo party into the central product of a retail business. Unfortunately, there was little demand for such merchandise on the local party circuit and even after adding ice luges and cockfights to his array of products, Quinn's business venture failed miserably.

Late that summer, Floydd flew to Seattle to begin collaboration on what was intended to be the first official album by "The Shagbarks," featuring both brothers together for the first time in years. The project quickly degenerated into an excercise in consuming as much fried chicken and french onion dip as possible, and was eventually scrapped. Instead, the brothers jumped into Quinn's barely-functioning Geo Prism and spent the next month wandering through the mountains and valleys of Montana, discussing plans for an ambitious project originally dreamed up back in Ohio consisting of a concept album serving as the basis for the establishment of a grassroots religious sect. The details were never fully fleshed out, however, and progress was halted when Floydd returned to Michigan.

The Seattle Quinn returned to seemed to offer little in the way of inspiration and in the early fall he packed his car and left, returning to the rugged wilderness of Montana, where he reconnected with several friends he'd made there over the years. The remainder of 1999 would be a time of transience and confusion spent largely outdoors for Shagbark, though he regularly sent postcards and bizarre messages labeled "News from Off the Grid" to various friends and relatives.

In the early winter, Shagbark migrated back to the Midwest. Just after Thanksgiving, he was nearly arrested in southern Ohio for trying to break into one of the many houses where he once lived, insisting that he'd left a set of guitar strings in a secret crawl space under the front porch. Amazingly, the ensuing search turned up a set of medium-guage D'Addarios and the amused police officer escorted him to the edge of town and let him go.

Shagbark surfaced back in Michigan for a short time, but spent the weeks leading up to the millenium celebration hiding out in central Florida, where he was convinced he'd be safe from the Y2K meltdown. Disappointed and disillusioned by the lack of any spectacular catastrophe, he eventually wound up at a house in northern Kentucky where Frank Swank was living with an old keyboardist cohort known as "The Manchild."

In 1998, Frank's band "Swank" had released it's first proper album, "Mark Your Maker," which credited "Hank and Frank Swank" as the sole performers. To this day, Shagbark insists he bears no relation to Hank Swank, but there is overwhelming proof to the contrary. When work began on Swank's follow-up, "Three Day Lurch," Shagbark was definitely in the area, and most likely helped write and perform the album even though he receives no credit or acknowledgement.

"Three Day Lurch" was written, recorded, and mixed in just three days, and on the fourth Quinn again found himself living under several inches of snow in central Michigan with a handful of strangers he'd been introduced to by a filmmaker whom he'd known since childhood. Shagbark's old friend had been  pilfering reels of film and equipment from a major automotive company where he'd been hired to film test crashes, and the two agreed to collaborate on a feature-length movie based on a script Shagbark had written in Seattle. Pre-production advanced in a promising manner, but the project was scrapped at the last second when the filmmaker moved to North Carolina to accept a position at a rapidly growing Internet company.

Quinn floundered about in the brutal Michigan winter for a few more weeks and began work on some songs which would later appear on his next album. Restlessness and discontentment soon took over, though, and Shagbark applied for a credit card in order to make it back to Seattle, where he was certain he'd left a large jar of change behind a loose tile in the bathroom of his old apartment.

The spring of 2000 saw Shagbark back in Seattle bouncing around from couch to couch, working an assortment of odd jobs ranging from data entry to pizza delivery, and watching an unhealthy amount of college basketball. For a short time, he amused himself by organizing ad hoc performances of the Hargy's Touse Band, a loose-knit group of unenthusiastic hard-drinking regulars from a small bar down the street from one of his many homes, the Morris Hotel. These were, for the most part, confused and ill-conceived sessions hampered by a lack of musicality and frequent arguments.

After another failed attempt to get his volcano-building business off the ground (there was a brief period of optimism when Shagbark rehashed the previous year's success at a follow-up Cinco de Mayo party) Quinn got down to recording his next album in the basement of a couple he knew from his days in Ohio. Marking the end of over a year's worth of madness, wandering, and poverty, "All Fixed Up" would turn out to be the most pastoral and literal of all Shagbark's albums. Songs like "Build a House" and "Road with No Cars" express a longing to escape not only the city but the frenzied lifestyle that went along with it. The wistful optomism of these songs also manages to belie the environment in which they were recorded. "A pipe broke in the basement," Shagbark wrote to his brother that fall. "And there's an inch-and-a-half of raw shit covering the floor down there. Nobody will come fix it or clean it up. Sometimes it stinks to high hell."

"All Fixed Up" was released just before Christmas of the year 2000, and though it suggested a newfound stability, some elements of uncertainty and fragility still peek through the framework of the album's title track ("I/don't drink/anymore....than i have to."). All the same, it closed the book on an era of Shagbark's career and was followed by a comfortable and uneventful silence.

Life in a Bucket

When Quinn returned to recording in the summer of 2001, it was with a vastly different perspective. Several months of steady employment led to the purchase of some new instruments and recording equipment, and when "Life in a Bucket" appeared in the fall, it was clearly painted from a different palette. For the first time, Shagbark produced songs that weren't primarily centered around accoustic guitar, and while his previous efforts had all strained against the conventions of form and content, it would be fair to say these songs finally break all the way through. Synthesizers swell and stab, countermelodies rise to tangle with each other, and rhythm and percussion play a larger role than ever before.

"Life in a Bucket" also contains the most wide-sweeping and colorful cast of characters of any Shagbark album. Couples break up on Dead tour, dying towns are temporarily preserved by the appearance of strangers, pickup trucks explode, people disappear, people reappear, people disappear again. In the end, it seems that little pieces of these songs have wandered back and forth into each other, searching for a place where they fit in a little better.

Not only would "Life in a Bucket" prove to be a huge step forward in Shagbark's development as a songwriter and producer, but it would also be a major impetus in the establishment of the HomeGrownNoodles record label.

In the final days of 2001, Quinn, Floydd, and Hank Swank convened in Maumee, OH, to attend a concert by The Sprags (long a favorite of all three musicians) and discuss the idea of participating in the newly-created "HomeGrownNoodles" collective/co-op/label recently started by an old acquaintance from Ohio. Two months later, the website www.homegrownnoodles.com was launched, offering the entire catalogs of Quinn W. Shagbark, Floydd H. Shagbark, Frank Swank, and Swank (the band) on compact disc for the first time. Over the next two years, the website and record label would bring the works of these self-effacing Midwesterners to music nerds across America and as far away as Europe and Japan. Never had Swank and the Shagbarks dreamed of achieving such mediocre and surprising recognition.

Shagbark further extended his musical reach by collaborating with a string of Seattle bands (Heather Graham is Hot, Fylo) and embarking on the most concentrated period of live performances his career would ever see. 2002 saw him shedding his debilitating stagefright to play regular club gigs and even touring a little throughout the spring and summer.  An eponymous Fylo CD was released over the summer, but Quinn either received no credit on the album or did so under an assumed name.

Propane Summer

In August, 2002, Fylo embarked on a short farewell tour and then broke up. Frank Swank flew into Seattle for the final show and the two friends spent a week driving around Washington photographing gas stations before Swank returned to Ohio and Shagbark retreated to his Seattle apartment to begin work on his fifth album.

Lush and quiet and slightly blurry, Propane Summer was released in November 2002 and immediately gained a wider audience than any Shagbark album to date. If the songs on Life in a Bucket tended to foreshadow an impending disaster (the repeated cry of "doesn't that look like a train that's aiming at this house?" which closes out "Lefty Accent") Propane Summer documents the aftermath, in which the pieces are being picked up and blindly reassembled against all laws of aesthetic logic.

Songs like "Truth & Nail" and "Seams at Weigh," with their delicately-interwoven guitar lines and oblique lyrics, display a more finely-tuned sense of craft than perhaps anything Shagbark has ever recorded. The centerpiece of the album, however, is the 11-minute title track. An ominous bassline serves as the backbone for a mini-symphony of experimental orchestration that remains unlike anything Shagbark has ever committed to tape. Dreamy, buoyant, and slightly hallucinatory, the song musically evokes the emotional hangover that is expressed more literally in other songs on the album. The chilling final lines, "echoes of a propane summer / creep in through the torn screen door / and nobody jokes about killing themselves anymore..." dangle off a cliff of buzzing synths for a few harrowing moments before "Underwater Crime" and "I'll Be the Canary in Your Coal Mine" close out the album by attempting to scare up a light (albeit a dim one) at the end of the tunnel.

Gone were the days of Shagbark accompanying himself solely on guitar, pots, and pans. While he had always inhabited his own slightly off-center universe, Propane Summer finally found Quinn creating songs that successfully translated his twisted worldview into music.

More Shit from the Bogus Captain

Steptoe Edwall 
Regina, Saskatchewan
October 1, 2004 

Postscript

I'll Shoot You Ace I Swear To God

Then came an album called I'll Shoot You Ace I Swear To God, in 2005.

Shameless

Then there was an album called Shameless in 2006.

Played Your Rhythm

Then there was an album of cover songs called Played Your Rhythm, also in 2006.